Madison County will update outdated emergency alert service
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MATT MOREY, Democrat News Reporter
At the next Azalea Festival, flowers will not be the only thing attendees see in red. Madison County Emergency Department will host a booth promoting its new emergency notification system CodeRED.
After an April 16 training meeting at the Fredericktown Police Department, E-911 Director Kyle Rogers said the department’s texting system Nixle was more than 10 years old and had not been pushed for at least a decade. It could be slow to send messages in emergencies.
“Nobody knows it exists,” he said.
Rogers estimated Nixle reaches about 4,000 people, where CodeRED could cover a county-wide population of 13,000. In CodeRED, messages can pinpoint specific areas of Madison County.
Rogers said, for example, during the battery plant disaster, it would only notify citizens in the area that the dispatcher draws a box around in a picture of the county. Six thousand people are already registered from a public database, according to the CodeRED representative.
“[We could use CodeRED] for important weather events, the CMR Fire would have been (a good example), electrical outages, boil orders, road closures, typical stuff from this area,” Rogers said.
Madison County deputy Rick Pogue described the old Nixle process as slow or confusing during a tornado since typing up the message to send an alert could not be done at the same time as sounding the siren for three minutes.
“You would have to copy and paste a message, and then press the buttons for the alarm, and then work on sending the messages again,” Pogue said.
The attendees of the training chose to include automated weather messages, and a Spanish language option at Alderman Kevin Jones’ recommendation.
“I know there’s a lot in town,” Jones said.
The training attendees chose to use unencrypted messages since they can send 4,000 per minute instead of just 400. The CodeRED representative said encrypted messages were typically used for sensitive information and not weather-type events in this case.
Madison County citizens can register for CodeRED on the online portal or by texting (MadisonMO to 24639). It requires the recipient’s name and address and will ask for a preferred delivery system via text or app notification. Emergency-911 plans to roll out CodeRED by next week and will have a booth at the Azalea Festival.
